Trinketization before the letter (vignettes) …. [one more time]

[random detritus – This was excised from an early draft of ‘Jungle Studies’, in 1995. I’m sure you can see why]:

It is probably important not to allow the vignette to replace analysis, the two are tied together, but we don’t want the story to provide an alibi for those who would avoid the implications of the theory. Here, elegance of prose can camouflage politics. This is particularly the case amongst those who would emphasize the post in post-colonialism, and use this as an opportunity to pretend colonialism has past, and in effect to write as if it never happened. This does happen, and is the modern equivalent of those anthropologists who benefited from the infrastructural facts of colonial power but claimed to have no part in the project. Staging opposition. The founding myth of fieldwork – of Malinowski almost accidentally ‘shipwrecked’ in the South Seas – rehearses this deceit.

There are several versions. The idea that missionaries – or anthropologists – were not also participating in the colonial order, however much some revisionist apologist (anthr-apologists) might want to complicate the position, cannot be ignored. Definitely, looking at the ways the ‘West’ travelled and was transformed in travel, is something that deserves more attention, but should not be taken as some sort of alibi for the violences of that travel (as sometimes happens with such work – I consider Dick Werbner’s various citations of the ‘anthropologists were not always complicit in colonialism’ routine to be in very poor taste/bad faith). The descendants of Gluckman may revere his little run-ins with the colonial authorities in Africa as ‘proof’ that he was not part of colonialism, when of course he was etc.

Why does it matter that telling stories clarifies the colour of politics? – perhaps because the slippage is the hinge of reaction. At the pomo workbench the maintenance of ongoing colonialisms slips past on the palanquin of narrative – even where the analysis oscillates between anecdotal evidence and the illustration of capitalist violence, the too-easy take up of only the storybook gems from the colonial scene rehearses again the Raj extraction process. Violence of partial explanations that serve the conquest (which of course does not mean we dream of a ‘full’ explanation, but that there are some less credible than others and we know which ones serve masters and which lead elsewhere).

Think for a moment of the way selective listening forges the subjectivity of oppression (perhaps in this telling the Emperor’s new clothes is not so much a story of the sycophantic courtiers as an exposure of the necessary blindness of naked power). As ever, the complexities of the circumstance can be recruited to tell another tale, more amenable to capital. The Emperor’s new clothes also tells of transition to the social relations of contemporary production – the young boy who exposes it all is nothing if not a culture hero of a brutal reality we face and embrace for good and bad.

Anthropologists who were recalcitrant and troublesome for colonialism may still unwittingly (or not – so often wittingly) be those best placed to extend colonial hegemony and power. This can be seen to happen through several modes; through the promotion of culture, through the mechanisms of inscription (cf. copies of the book of Nuer prophets in the hands of contemporary Nuer – Johnson), through focus on identity, and identifications, through reification and so on. It is important not only to see this in anecdotal terms, even where the anecdotes are so compelling, but rather to recognize the vignettes as examples of a web of institutionalized power (persuasive AND coercive force) deployed systematically across the globe. That the term post-colonialism has one part of its heritage in literature has enabled some to make the anecdotal narration of post-modern anthropology into a methodological doxa, and along the way renounced any theoretical specificity and ushered in a still more reactionary politics than ever before. The other more explicitly political sources for the term post-colonial require a more nuanced comprehension of the ironic and restricted way in which the term was used to refer to a certain betrayal of anti-colonial struggle on the part of national elites and the comprador classes after the so-called fact of decolonisation (Spivak). Within the horizon of this conception of the post-colony anecdotal post-modernisms appear as spurious frivolity.

Responses to “Trinketization before the letter (vignettes)”

Anonymous Says:July 3, 2008 at 4:22 pmeThe fact I am leaving this anonymously tells you something about the state of anthropology and sociology and the broader academic ‘world’ that currently exists here, where I am writing to you. That’s Johannesburg. That’s a particular university here, a grand, old university once famous for its activism against apartheid. Today, today, today, it is this that you describe. The post in its post-colonial myopia taken to ridiculous, absurd and sometimes deeply upsetting publications, discourses and lectures. Here, a liberal elite of largely white anglo-saxon and jewish factions run the colleges, the lecture halls and the public debates. The hypocrisy is noted by many, including this appallingly low-paid cleaner who told me today: “They write about people they don’t know anything about. They write books about people they are scared of. And they become famous and everyone praises them. But they don’t even know how to speak to the people they write about. They have no experience of mixing with us. But they write about us.” And when he’d finished talking to me, he smiled and patted me on the shoulder. “Go and eat your lunch in the sun.”

john hutnyk Says:July 3, 2008 at 4:32 pmeThere is a scene in Anand Patwardan’s 1982 (?) documentary film “Bombay Our City” where a woman from a bustee (slum) says to camera something like: “hey you. What can your film do for me? Hey? Nothing! Go on filming” – or similar. Vishwapriya Iyengar was happy to say Anand was right to leave that bit in.

Myself, writing about tourists in Calcutta, I still got the comment – ‘and you John, staring at people then writing books about them’.

Reflexivity had already become passive when Adorno denounced it – so what can our writing do then? Spivak as ever: Its not a matter of who is speaking, but what that speaking might do.